It’s interesting watching the advertising industry change these days. On one hand, it’s seeing increasing opportunities to present itself in novel places. On another hand, it’s demonstrating a curious mix of understated professionalism that doesn’t quite know how to behave in those new spaces, versus some utterly amateur attempts at advertising with clearly no background or experience in the practice, growing up in public as it were. On yet another hand, I suspect that the advertising industry will be the next thing to go the way that the print media newspaper industry is currently going, although there’s plenty of time yet for the newmedia ad industry to wallow in.

Ultimately, I don’t think advertising will be effective in these new spaces unless it’s entertaining or adding value in some way (besides simply promoting something in our faces). In my opinion, the ‘review’ will supplant the advert, but then again, we’ve got the same problem only worse, there – reviews are increasingly written by utter amateurs, rendering much of them valueless.

It can’t very well have been the same thing. That would sort of defeat the point of having patents.

Actually, patent litigation uncovers pre-existing conflicting patents all the time. Prior art gets uncovered all the time too. The US patent office does not seem to do a good job of screening patents to see if they cover stuff already patented, or technologies already widely used. Probably they receive too many patent applications and too little money.

And that was long before they rubbed salt in it by unilaterally aborting the paid-for extended warranty on ImageWriters and other peripherals about a decade later.

That couldn’t happen with open-source operations, of course: no warranties to begin with…